I do not know what I am doing here

Back here, Cath is keen to dispel any lingering Milanese warmth I might be cradling.

She emails me (emailing someone who lives with you?) "you sent the rent to the wrong account. Luckily there was enough in there to pay the rent," cc'ing her daughter in to my telling off.

Monday morning, and I've sorted the recycling incorrectly. In the street, she flings down the new bag we've been given from the council for Type a(2)(b) (not brown or multicoloured except if Type c(1)) paper and card. She shouts up to my window. "Looby! Can you come down?" "What's the problem Cath?" "Can you sort this out? They won't take it otherwise!", before slamming the car door and driving off.

This evening, she texts me about today's "house meeting" which I'd forgotten about. I lie and say I'm with Mel but could get back for about half past eight. "Not tonight then, but we have to have a meeting. Saturday 6pm?"

Why do we have to have a meeting? More generally, what is the advantage to them to me being here? Why didn't they get a two-bed place for themselves?

I'm walking down the high street when I am hailed by a woman. "Hiya looby!" She was sat with a bloke on the perimeter wall of a pub. She looked unrecallably familiar, until I realised that I'd met her outside a pub a month or so ago, when we ended up down a side street doing weed and speed on some office building's steps. It's a pharamceutically silly combination; but the social cement it formed was more important.

She texted me three times today. "Were u to"; "ring"; "meet down the park".

As I do so, work rings to offer me a housekeeping job at five hundred pounds a week and a one-bed flat. But you have to drive. I gesture to Cory with a questioning, drinking gesture. I think it's rude to take phone calls when you're with someone, but I need money. She replied with the apologetic shrug of someone who has none.

After the call, I explain why I took the call, and go to the offy to get us a drink. She told me about her friend who used to make mcat in the bath; her children, two younger ones with their dad, two older ones with her sister-in-law, and access arrangements; about getting off crack and heroin. Clean for five days now.

I told her about Cath's peskiness. "Well, I've got a three bed house. Just up there on --- Ave. All brand new. I wouldn't see you short of a place."

I don't want to push myself onto Mel, who's just back from Greece, but I ring her anyway, and I'm delighted when she suggests I come over to our pub. I'm tired from a night shift, ten till six, shelf stacking at Sainsbury's, so I nip back to mine and do a little speed. I bump into Cath at the front door who tells me that I've got something just there on my nose.

Our pub is closed, so we go to another, a cold, deserted place. She gives me a present and tells me to take a drink from it. It's one of those paint strippers that Scotland and southern Europe produce. I want to ask her to circle her finger in my palm, which excited me early on, the first time we started touching, but I don't. It's not the right situation.

The apologetic young landlady tells us that the pub is shutting at nine, so we walk up to my bus stop where there is no bus for half an hour. Her mouth is faggy from her smoking, and it's an effort to retrain myself to like it, but we spend the half hour kissing, my hands sliding around her anoraked waist.

The sad realisation of us having nowhere to go for our courtship other than bus stops comes upon us both at the same time: she living with her mother, me sharing a house with a wound-up spring in human form.